Integrated Remote Sensing and Forecasting of Regional Terrestrial Precipitation with Global Nonlinear and Nonstationary Teleconnection Signals Using Wavelet Analysis

Global sea surface temperature (SST) anomalies have a demonstrable effect on terrestrial climate dynamics throughout the continental U.S. SST variations have been correlated with greenness (vegetation densities) and precipitation via ocean-atmospheric interactions known as climate teleconnections. Prior research has demonstrated that teleconnections can be used for climate prediction across a wide region at sub-continental scales. Yet these studies tend to have large uncertainties in estimates by utilizing simple linear analyses to examine chaotic teleconnection relationships. Still, non-stationary signals exist, making teleconnection identification difficult at the local scale. Part 1 of this research establishes short-term (10-year), linear and non-stationary teleconnection signals between SST at the North Atlantic and North Pacific oceans and terrestrial responses of greenness and precipitation along multiple pristine sites in the northeastern U.S., including (1) White Mountain National Forest - Pemigewasset Wilderness, (2) Green Mountain National Forest - Lye Brook Wilderness and (3) Adirondack State Park - Siamese Ponds Wilderness. Each site was selected to avoid anthropogenic influences that may otherwise mask climate teleconnection signals. Lagged pixel-wise linear teleconnection patterns across anomalous datasets found significant correlation regions between SST and the terrestrial sites. Non-stationary signals also exhibit salient co-variations at biennial and triennial frequencies between terrestrial responses and SST anomalies across oceanic regions in agreement with the El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) signals. Multiple regression analysis of the combined ocean indices explained up to 50% of the greenness and 42% of the precipitation in the study sites. The identified short-term teleconnection signals improve the understanding and projection of climate change impacts at local scales, as well as harness the interannual periodicity information for future climate projections. Part 2 of this research paper builds upon the earlier short-term study by exploring a long-term (30-year) teleconnection signal investigation between SST at the North Atlantic and Pacific oceans and the precipitation within Adirondack State Park in upstate New York. Non-traditional teleconnection signals are identified using wavelet decomposition and teleconnection mapping specific to the Adirondack region. Unique SST indices are extracted and used as input variables in an artificial neural network (ANN) prediction model. The results show the importance of considering non-leading teleconnection patterns as well as the known teleconnection patterns. Additionally, the effects of the Pacific Ocean SST or the Atlantic Ocean SST on terrestrial precipitation in the study region were compared with each other to deepen the insight of sea-land interactions. Results demonstrate reasonable prediction skill at forecasting precipitation trends with a lead time of one month, with r values of 0.6. The results are compared against a statistical downscaling approach using the HadCM3 global circulation model output data and the SDSM statistical downscaling software, which demonstrate less predictive skill at forecasting precipitation within the Adirondacks

Nevertheless, She Legislated: A Study of Women Representing Women in Congress

Though women make up only a small fraction of the nation’s legislature, they are often stronger legislators than their male colleagues. Scholars have also found that, over time, these women pay more attention to issues considered more salient to women voters than their male counterparts do. But do women legislators provide better substantive representation to women in the electorate in comparison to men? This study utilizes methodology outlined by Frisch and Kelly (2003) to determine patterns in congresswomen’s committee assignments, and methodology utilized by Michele Swers (2002b) to determine whether women serving in the 111th, 113th, and 114th Congresses were more likely to sponsor women-salient legislation than men were. From there, I aimed to discover whether women serving in Congress have a greater representative responsibility than their male counterparts. I hypothesize that on the whole, men are more likely than women to achieve assignments to prestigious committees while women are more likely to be assigned to committees whose issue jurisdictions are considered more women-salient. I also hypothesize that women are more likely to sponsor women-salient legislation than their male counterparts are. These hypotheses are mostly supported by the data gathered, but the results also show that party control and issue saliency have a great influence over how women choose to provide substantive representation and what structural obstacles stand in the way of them doing so. The data generally points to the conclusion that women in Congress, who often view themselves as representatives of both their constituencies and their entire gender, have a greater representative responsibility than their male colleagues

The robustness of the weak selection approximation for the evolution of altruism against strong selection.

The weak selection approximation of population genetics has made possible the analysis of social evolution under a considerable variety of biological scenarios. Despite its extensive usage, the accuracy of weak selection in predicting the emergence of altruism under limited dispersal when selection intensity increases remains unclear. Here, we derive the condition for the spread of an altruistic mutant in the infinite island model of dispersal under a Moran reproductive process and arbitrary strength of selection. The simplicity of the model allows us to compare weak and strong selection regimes analytically. Our results demonstrate that the weak selection approximation is robust to moderate increases in selection intensity and therefore provides a good approximation to understand the invasion of altruism in spatially structured population. In particular, we find that the weak selection approximation is excellent even if selection is very strong, when either migration is much stronger than selection or when patches are large. Importantly, we emphasize that the weak selection approximation provides the ideal condition for the invasion of altruism, and increasing selection intensity will impede the emergence of altruism. We discuss that this should also hold for more complicated life cycles and for culturally transmitted altruism. Using the weak selection approximation is therefore unlikely to miss out on any demographic scenario that lead to the evolution of altruism under limited dispersal

Eléments pour une analyse critique des systèmes d'information géographique

Nous dressons dans cet article un panorama des projets de systèmes d'informations géographique (SIG), et nous les analysons de différents points de vue, notamment en fonction de leur orgine, de leur problématique, ou du mode de circulation des informations qu'ils sous-tendent. Cette analyse aboutit à une typologie des projets de SIG, et au-delà, elle permet de poser les bases d'un guide méthodologique des SIG, destiné aux entreprises, aux collectivités locales, ainsi qu'aux organismes de recherche confrontés à l'évaluation à priori ou à posteriori de projets de SIG. (Résumé d'auteur

Evolutionary Game Theory and the Adaptive Dynamics Approach: Adaptation where Individuals Interact

Evolutionary game theory and the adaptive dynamics approach have made invaluable contributions to understand how gradual evolution leads to adaptation when individuals interact. Here, we review some of the basic tools that have come out of these contributions to model the evolution of quantitative traits in complex populations. We collect together mathematical expressions that describe directional and disruptive selection in class- and group-structured populations in terms of individual fitness, with the aims of bridging different models and interpreting selection. In particular, our review of disruptive selection suggests there are two main paths that can lead to diversity: (i) when individual fitness increases more than linearly with trait expression; (ii) when trait expression simultaneously increases the probability that an individual is in a certain context (e.g. a given age, sex, habitat, size or social environment) and fitness in that context. We provide various examples of these and more broadly argue that population structure lays the ground for the emergence of polymorphism with unique characteristics. Beyond this, we hope that the descriptions of selection we present here help see the tight links among fundamental branches of evolutionary biology, from life-history to social evolution through evolutionary ecology, and thus favour further their integration

The evolution of environmentally mediated social interactions and posthumous spite under isolation by distance.

Many social interactions happen indirectly via modifications of the environment, e.g. through the secretion of functional compounds or the depletion of renewable resources. Here, we derive the selection gradient on a quantitative trait affecting dynamical environmental variables that feed back on reproduction and survival in a finite patch-structured population subject to isolation by distance. Our analysis shows that the selection gradient depends on how a focal individual influences the fitness of all future individuals in the population through modifications of the environmental variables they experience, weighted by the neutral relatedness between recipients and the focal. The evolutionarily relevant trait-driven environmental modifications are formalized as the extended phenotypic effects of an individual, quantifying how a trait change in an individual in the present affects the environmental variables in all patches at all future times. When the trait affects reproduction and survival through a payoff function, the selection gradient can be expressed in terms of extended phenotypic effects weighted by scaled relatedness. We show how to compute extended phenotypic effects, relatedness, and scaled relatedness using Fourier analysis, which allow us to investigate a broad class of environmentally mediated social interactions in a tractable way. We use our approach to study the evolution of a trait controlling the costly production of some lasting commons (e.g. a common-pool resource or a toxic compound) that can diffuse in space and persist in time. We show that indiscriminate posthumous spite readily evolves in this scenario. More generally, whether selection favours environmentally mediated altruism or spite is determined by the spatial correlation between an individual's lineage and the commons originating from its patch. The sign of this correlation depends on interactions between dispersal patterns and the commons' renewal dynamics. More broadly, we suggest that selection can favour a wide range of social behaviours when these have carry-over effects in space and time

The evolution and consequences of sex-specific reproductive variance.

Natural selection favors alleles that increase the number of offspring produced by their carriers. But in a world that is inherently uncertain within generations, selection also favors alleles that reduce the variance in the number of offspring produced. If previous studies have established this principle, they have largely ignored fundamental aspects of sexual reproduction and therefore how selection on sex-specific reproductive variance operates. To study the evolution and consequences of sex-specific reproductive variance, we present a population-genetic model of phenotypic evolution in a dioecious population that incorporates previously neglected components of reproductive variance. First, we derive the probability of fixation for mutations that affect male and/or female reproductive phenotypes under sex-specific selection. We find that even in the simplest scenarios, the direction of selection is altered when reproductive variance is taken into account. In particular, previously unaccounted for covariances between the reproductive outputs of different individuals are expected to play a significant role in determining the direction of selection. Then, the probability of fixation is used to develop a stochastic model of joint male and female phenotypic evolution. We find that sex-specific reproductive variance can be responsible for changes in the course of long-term evolution. Finally, the model is applied to an example of parental-care evolution. Overall, our model allows for the evolutionary analysis of social traits in finite and dioecious populations, where interactions can occur within and between sexes under a realistic scenario of reproduction